Ten Americans, by Ray

10. Richard Cheney
Dick has become the epitome of all that is wrong with America - corporate greed, technocratic power, obsessive secrecy, manifest destiny, public lies, personal betrayals, illicit profit, and a sense of entitlement to all of these. His political lineage goes back to Nixon, he moves in all the right circles, and has become the shadow emperor he has always dreamt of. First on my list of those I'd like to see nailed to the wall.

9. William "Boss" Tweed
Boss begat and perfected the machine that grips America to this day, and made Tammany Hall into the blueprint for the nation. Curse his corrupt and blighted soul, if he ever had one.

8. J. Robert Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer built the bomb in whose shadow we live today, and worse, he knew what he was doing.

7. Henry Ford
Ford found a new way to build things. He built them well enough, and built so many, the rest could do nothing but emulate him. He also hated Jews, and hated unions, and hated anyone who did not subscribe to his particular version of how the world should work, and spread his hate with his methods. Also, Fords suck.

6. Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.
Joe was everything an American is supposed to be: a banker, a politician, a millionare, a moviemaker, a whiskey smuggler, a dynastic figure. He bent and dodged rules, used insider info, sold short, bought and sold and threatened people, and refused to let the inconvenient death of his intended heir stop him from constructing a president.

5. Ulysses S. Grant/Robert E. Lee
The first was direct and brutal, the second elegant and graceful. One almost won the war, the other did. Both fought for the wrong sides. One was a corrupt president, ushering in the era of corporate domination and almost destroying any chance of reconciliation. The other fought entirely on principle, and freed his few slaves upon his death. The two were the snake and mongoose that very nearly made the Civil War a permanent affair. (And perhaps, in some ways, did.)

4. Lyndon B. Johnson/Robert S. McNamara
These two also worked only as a pair, both enslaving themselves to their concept of duty and nearly destroying their country in the process. Johnson fought Hoover and won, fought the segregationists and won, fought the hawks and lost. McNamara fought the old ideas and won, only to realize afterwards that his victory was the more devastating alternative. Both exemplified the American affliction of technocratic power that destroyed what it was supposed to save.

3. Richard Nixon/Henry Kissenger
As with Johnson/McNamara, but subtracting loftier ideals and adding paranoia, secrecy, higher body counts and a fervent belief that the populace must be lied to constantly. Nixon was Shakespearean in his hubris and his conflicts, being a warring Quaker and an untrusting person who wanted to be trusted. Kissenger questions every theology of redemption ever devised.

2. J. Edgar Hoover
Hoover was the most successful spymaster since Francis Walsingham in the court of Elizabeth. He knew everyone and almost everything, and his schemes infected American politics for forty years. He hated himself and everyone else. Still, he made the FBI into something from nothing, and American lawmen into something besides sherriffs. And until Cheney, there was no better example of a shadow ruler. Machiavelli would have smiled, then wept.

1. Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson's fundamental contradiction between man and myth, between who could be free and who should be, between the words that still stir many a heart and Sally Hemmings fucked in a back room is the basis for the schizophrenia of what should have been the greatest nation on earth.